Lights, camera, arguing, spots, action!

There are three words that strike fear into any family’s heart. Family Photo Shoot.

It's not just me is it? You've all be through the trauma too, right? If not, I envy you. Sold by parents as a lasting memory, a keepsake for future generations, it's actually a hellish experience. It is always chaotic. If you're unlucky enough to have little children in tow, they're always screaming, someone always has a breakout of spots on their face and there's always that person who ends up with a twitchy eye making smiling impossible.

Or there is in my family photos anyway. I had to go through this torturous yearly routine last week. My brother had spots, I was unable to smile, and when you put my family together you get a loud, argumentative mess.

Somehow though Dale Chalk of Affinity Studios put everyone together and actually managed to get a huge amount of photos taken. He actually managed to make us look a fairly normal bunch of people. Well, apart from my brother whose inability to cooperate in this environment make him a bit of a lost cause, but that isn’t really Dale’s fault.

To be honest, the whole experience just ended up being a bit of fun. There were moments when my family were creeping out from behind my grandparents to ruin what would have been a lovely photo of them, times when I was sprawled out across the floor and a few seconds when I was making my brother run whilst giving me a piggy back around the room.

For a while I even forgot that he was there taking the photos, which would probably explain why my facial expressions in the images that we DIDN’T buy were a tad, er, odd and far from photogenic (I won’t blame Dale for that one either).

On the whole the photos were amazing. The session itself only cost us £25 but then it came to choosing which ones we actually wanted printed. It took us around about an hour - no exaggeration - to pick our favourites, and even then we only managed to narrow it down to eight prints. It also shows just how difficult it was to pick the ‘best’ ones. What I really liked, someone else hated.

Luckily for us, as the order had totalled up to over £400, we had a voucher that entitled us to knock off
nearly half of the cost. While it may seem expensive, when you consider just how much work goes into the process it is understandable; not only did we have the photos taken, then shown to us, then edited to remove the dreaded spots but they were also printed in the various sizes that we wanted. So all-in-all, it took up a lot of time.

In all honesty the only thing that I was ever-so-slightly disappointed with is you can definitely tell the printed photographs have been edited. Although looking like we could be relatives of the flawless families of Twilight vampires can’t be an entirely bad thing, can it?

While it clearly isn’t something that I could afford to do often, I would say it was well worth splashing out the money, which I did for my mum’s Christmas present, to get the photos. The end product is definitely worth it and I hate to admit it, but I actually quite enjoyed posing to have my photo taken. Watch out Cara!

Shannon is a very proud British girl, with a love for a cup of tea and an evening curled up with her cats watching Notting Hill. You'll often find her dusting off the mud after a day with her unpredictable pony Rocky. A procrastinator, she spends most of her time practicing these skills as opposed to doing anything she's meant to be doing.